Digging with water instead of a bucket. It pays better than most Class A truck seats in this basin, and you can do it on a Class B...which makes it one of the shortest routes to good money out here. Every number below came off a posting we opened and read.
| Company | Where | Posted pay | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| WISCO Trucking (WTI) | Williston | $30–35/hr | Class B + tanker, 2 yrs · DOE |
| Dupree Oilfield Services | Williston | $28–35/hr | Class B, A preferred · no housing |
| Martin Construction | Dickinson | $30–34/hr | DOE · Class A preferred, B acceptable |
| Massive Services | Watford City | $28–34/hr | Class B, A preferred · housing available · based on experience |
Four were confirmed still up on September 27, and those are the ones named here. The other two were read since August and still count toward the ranges, unnamed.
They get lumped together constantly and they are two different trades.
A vac truck hauls liquid. Produced water, tank bottoms, spills. You suck it up and you take it somewhere. Supervac is a vac truck too, not a hydrovac.
A hydrovac digs. High pressure water breaks the ground up and the vacuum lifts the slurry out. You are excavating...exposing buried pipe and cable, potholing, slot trenching...in places where putting a trackhoe in the ground would cut something expensive.
One is a hauling job. The other is an excavation job that happens to need a licence. The postings show it plainly. The ones still up talk about potholing, daylighting, excavation and damage prevention, and one we read in August asked for experience with excavators, dozers, loaders, backhoes and graders. That is construction language, not trucking language.
Here is the thing most hands out here do not realise.
Hydrovac runs on a Class B. One Williston employer requires a Class B with tanker and two years on it. Another requires a Class B and prefers an A. A third says Class A preferred, Class B acceptable.
And it pays $28 to $45 an hour...right alongside winch truck and flat deck, and in the same country as crude hauling, all of which need a Class A.
A Class B is faster and cheaper to get than a Class A. If you are a swamper or a green hand deciding which school to pay for, that is worth sitting with. Everybody assumes an oilfield truck job means a Class A. This one does not, and it is one of the better paying seats in the basin.
Tanker endorsement comes up on some of these, because the truck carries the slurry it digs up. Get that with the B.
From the descriptions we read, in their own words:
One employer states outright that driving is only about 10 to 15 percent of the job. The rest is operating the equipment and working the ground. Expect to sit, lift, stoop, bend, squat, kneel, reach and crawl, repeatedly, outdoors, in whatever the weather is doing.
One Watford City employer requires you to relocate before starting work, and has housing available. A Williston one has no housing and says it pays higher wages in lieu of it. Another offers a $2,000 sign on bonus and pays $2,000 for every qualified driver you refer. Ask about all of it...a move costs you money, and a referral pays you.
All from postings we read, so you can compare like for like:
Hydrovac holds its own against every one of them, and it is the only seat on that list you can run on a Class B.
Hydrovac needs a Class B, not a Class A. If you are starting from nothing, the swamper seat is how hands out here get into a truck without paying for school up front...and the B is the shorter road.
How Swampers Get Into A Truck →Six North Dakota hydrovac postings from six employers, every one opened and read, between August and September 2026. On September 27 we checked them again and read the new one: four were confirmed still up, and those are named with company and town next to each number. A posting we could not find still up counts toward the ranges for 6 months from the last day we saw it, but it loses its name.
We report what a company posted. We do not grade it.
Two other North Dakota hydrovac listings carried annual ranges with cents attached. That is the signature of a job site's own salary model rather than a figure an employer typed, so we left them out. It is the same reason you should not trust a salary estimate anywhere else either.
The postings behind this page were read in September 2026 or, for the older ones, in August. The figures here are a reading from those months, not a promise of what any company pays today.
Government baseline for context: the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the all occupations mean wage for the West North Dakota nonmetropolitan area at $29.27/hr (May 2023, OEWS). Every hydrovac posting we read tops out above it.
We post a fresh North Dakota board every week, and we read the descriptions so you do not have to. Free.
Every one of these is a real seat in this basin, paying what the company said it pays. Never worked the patch before? Start with how to get an oilfield job with no experience.
Work one of these seats? Tell us what you actually make. Your name, email and company are never published, and nothing goes public until a seat has 5 reports behind it.